The NAMs conundrum in the current regulatory risk assessment: progress without clarity?

The gradual build up of political and societal pressures over the past few decades has led to a considerable momentum for moving away from animal testing for chemical risk assessments towards alternative non-animal methods (NAMs). However, despite a lot of progress made in this field, the true potential of NAMs to replace animal tests has yet to be realised. This is because of the structure and practice of the current risk assessment paradigm, and the uncertainties and lack of standardised frameworks for 'weighting' NAMs data when integrating to the overall weight of evidence for use in risk assessment. This Editorial highlights the key issues to focus attention in regard to the mismatch between general expectations and true ranking of the data generated by NAMs for use in regulatory risk assessment of chemicals.